Housekeeping Note: Batteries and Typos

Our new issue is out. I know that you've already Subscribed! Meanwhile, apart from all the other value between its covers -- and really, a lot of exceptional pieces in this issue -- these housekeeping points involving me:

I have a one-page precis of some exciting developments in the non-exciting-seeming realm of battery technology. This is based on an interview with Steven Chu -- former Secretary of Energy, winner of the Nobel prize in physics, now professor at Stanford -- and Yi Cui, another Stanford professor who is at the frontier of battery research. Batteries don't get the big headlines, but as these professors explain, they're the key to most hopes for shifting to cleaner energy sources.

That precis came from a much longer interview. We'll have an extended-play version of that interview available online soon. Stay tuned.

By the luck of the draw, the past two issues of the magazine have included articles by me each of which had an unfortunate typo. In this battery story, it was "electrode" in a sentence that should have said "electron." We've fixed the online version. In the previous month's story, a sentence that should have said that Burlington, Vermont's minor league baseball team "was" the Reds -- as they were, when then-mayor Bernie Sanders brought them to town -- instead said that the team "is" the Reds. As anyone who has been to Vermont knows, the current team is of course the Vermont Lake Monsters.

We try harder, and do better, than most publications in avoiding mistakes of all sorts, including typos. But I am chagrined that in the millions of words we/I put out, these consequential letters were wrong: de rather than ns in one article, and i rather than wa in another.

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James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.